As an Infomaniak user myself, I don’t feel much need to complain or to ask for help but I would not mind a community where people can discuss ideas, tips & tricks and why not, ask for help. Maybe all what’s needed for this to happen is someone to start doing it?

So, if you feel like it, don’t be afraid to start such a community. Worse case, it won’t get much traction and no harm will be done. Best case, you maybe surprised to realize a few people were looking for exactly that ;)

Antidote. From Druide Informatique is a great set of spellcheckers (and gramamtical guides) for French and for English.

Alas, a few years ago they dropped their Linux version. Also, it’s not from the EU but from Canada… which has not yet been invaded by the USA.

Edit: too many things to list, I’m tired (and I don’t have Antidote on my Linux machine)

I’m not much of a gamer (I play chess, though), I only wanted to say I needed no ‘fix’ nor terminal in order to get my Mint to update to its latest versions ;)

Mint 22.1 still runs Kernel 6.8 whoch means you’ll be hitting the terminal to either upgrade to mainline kernel

The last two major updates of Mint were done through some GUI. There were a few warnings (about a few extra apps I had installed) but everything was done through that app and went smoothly. Edit: and so quickly (yeah, I’m looking at you, macOS)

or add extra repositories

I don’t think I use extra repositories but I did add two PPAs and did it through the GUI ‘Software Sources’ that comes with Mint. I just checked, it also offers the option to add ‘Additional repositories’, if that means ‘extra’?

• Firefox is owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which is US-based and I say that as a lifelong Firefox user, mind you. Waterfox is a UK-based fork of Firefox. Not owned by Mozilla. Also, based on Chromium (the open source part of Chrome) there is the cool Vivaldi browser (Norway).
• Why Ubuntu only? Promoting almost any GNU/Linux distro would be a good move. I will promote the one I’m using: Mint. I’m happy to say that everything works out of the box and have been working great for 4 or 5 years now—and I never have to use the command line if I don’t want to… which, frankly, I don’t mind using, quite the contrary ;)
• Cloud: I tried following the suggest links and gave up on the 3rd one. It’s too technical, at least for me. depends what you’re looking for but here is a couple of EU/European cloud storage providers I use: Infomaniak (Swiss, works great, more features than just cloud), Filen.io (German, works great, more limited in features but offers full end-to-end encryption).

Scoop for the German government: we also have no real alternative to US troops/military supply. Should we lower the EU flag and welcome anyone wishing to took hold of it since the USA has made it clear it’s now up to the EU to defend itself?

All those ungrateful tourists that can’t stand the idea of getting mistakenly deported into a High Security Salvadoran prison and then being left to rot there because ‘yeah, it’s kinda annoying but we can’t get him back, you know’.

If I were the all-mighty orange dude, I would put a 146% tax on every single tourist that is refusing to come spend their money in the USA! They’re nothing but traitors! They should pay! And maybe I would invade their country, to show the world who’s the boss.

One could be surprised ;)

Yep, like one of them said trust will be hard to restore.

That Trump is a diva addicted to having a tantrum we knew it, that’s no surprise and I could not care less him being… who he is. But to realize how simple and effort-less it was for him to break existing deals, engagements and decades long alliances while also humiliating Zelensky in the oval office, on TV, without anyone, no one of the other US political powers supposed to prevent abuse of power even protest? And then hear Trump tell all of us we could go fuck ourselves if we did not agree to pay him whatever amount of money he considered fair, like some gangster trying to racket shop owners on the block, in exchange for his ‘protection’? That’s the real issue. At least, it’s for me.

I trusted such an absurd thing would not be possible in the USA, not as easily and not as abruptly. I was completely wrong.

Trust won’t be easy to get back.

Could not tell as I have not looked at Lego at all for decades, but prices have been getting delirious with quite many things in the last few years.

I can’t resist mentioning your fellow (or should I say foe?) blood takers community, !vampires@lemmy.zip

Sorry (partly, at least) for my silly humor, and welcome :)

I did not know that. I had the idea they were from the UK.

Btw, Lego is Danish. Or has that changed and the company been sold? I have not played with Lego for 50 years or so, I may be a bit rusty ;)

in France, we have this saying ‘Nécesité fait loi’ which means you make do with what you have and to the best of your abilities. Also, my little finger is telling me quite a few EU countries would not mind a more authoritarian country entering the Council, a country that would then be used to tell France and Germany (and who knows, the warmly welcomed-back UK, one of these days) to go funk themselves. But I may be wrong.

You mean China? They are not part of NATO. Note that the election of Trump have almost made it crystal clear the USA does not care much about NATO anymore (they seem to only care about Ukraine’s underground which is not yet part of the EU (what a happy coincidence). So Turkish armed force ranking may very well already be a non-question just that we, NATO-members, have not been officially told so yet… In Which case China and Russia, and Turkey?, would be very happy.

Turkey has asked to join the EU already. It was denied last time but something tells me next time they may be very welcome instead.
(hint: Turkey has the second biggest army in NATO right after the USA and has the most active/quickly growing weapon/armament industry in Europe too)

I won’t cry for Musk, quite the contrary… But I also don’t know how important the EU as a market is for Tesla?

Sadly, part of the reality right now is, that there is no perfect swap-in replacement for what Starlink is being used for,

100% agree on that but, like you said, I wanted to see a more… encouraging way of saying it. This sounds a bit too much like an already failed effort. Yesterday morning, I was reading the latest US demands on Ukraine (imho, we should all closely read them in order to understand what the USA has now turned into and what kind of treatment we can expect from them in the (near) future) and I think we really should not let Ukraine down at the time they have to face Putin’s Russia and now also have to face the new bully on the block, Trump’s USA—which won’t be kind with them the moment they realize they may not get all what they asked from Ukraine (and hopefully they won’t get it). Like, not kind at all.

“relatively fast” is not what I wanted to read. It should be done as fast as possible. If in order to keep its ability to communicate efficiently Ukraine is forced to accept the latest delirious US demands, it’s the entire EU that will lose. Big time.

I don’t like the law to make an example out of anyone, I would rather see the law being effective and equally applied to all.

Also, these kind of regulations are precisely one of the things Trump and his billionaire bosses are trying to get rid of.

That’s another question, imho. Worth discussing, for sure. But I would say the rules of the vote were known before the vote. If one doesn’t agree with them, that’s obviously fine but they should have questioned them (and then their choice of not voting) before the vote, not question a result that is following the rules of that vote.